Band of Neighbors

Rising Star of the Year - Bob Hayden

The Greater Fresno Area Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with the Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the Central Valley Business Incubator, held the Second Annual Entrepreneurial Awards Luncheon yesterday at TorNino’s in Fresno. (full article)

Bob Hayden, CEO of Band of Neighbors, LLC, came away with an award for Rising Star of the Year and a check for $3000.   The Rising Star award is bestowed upon a business that’s been in existence for fewer than five years.  Bob’s reaction to receiving the award was nothing short of genuine, “I got into this to help people.  This award makes me feel like I’m on the right track.”

Ray Dunn, Chair of the Board of Directors for the Chamber talked a bit about the importance of entrepreneurship:

They’re thinking on their own, creating their own businesses, and creating jobs for the area.

Congratulations Bob, and many thanks to everyone that believes in Band of Neighbors.

(video footage coming soon)

Turning Over A New Leaf

With the recent launch of the new Band of Neighbors brand, I wanted to do the usual “bandofneighbors.com launches new website” post.  But I hate those.

So instead, I’m just going to give you a quick history of Band of Neighbors.  There’s a long way to go to where we want to be, but look at all that’s happened:

Motivation

Bob Hayden, a landscape engineer, is horrified when he reads of a crime in which a woman was stabbed in the street. The assailant returns to the scene of the crime to stab her some more, and no one calls the police.  The problem?  Everyone was sure someone else made the call.

Idea

Bob is convinced there should be a way where people are notified if/when the police have been called.

Progression

At first the idea was a system with codes sent to pagers. The codes would be deciphered giving the nature of the message.  For example, if my pager receives #44, I would know there had been a theft and 911 has been called.  This idea was flawed in a number of ways, namely: everyone would be required to buy a pager, and how who wants to learn a bunch of codes? So the iterations continued.

Design idea two was still pager based, but was integrated with existing alarm systems.   With this design, people could respond to the alerts.   It was still code-based and still required too much overhead.

Between 2004-2006 Bob took some entry-level business classes at the Central Valley Business Incubator and the Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.  He moved into the Incubator building in early 2007 and officially started his business, Band of Neighbors, in April of that year.  In June Michael Wanke came onboard and the process of finding the right technologies for the ‘alert system’ began.

Lots of time was spent reviewing the business plan, and hammering out the details of the alert system.  Many iterations and possible partnerships later, Band of Neighbors hired an outside software development firm to develop a prototype of the working idea:

1. Call a centralized, toll-free number.
2. Record a message.
3. Distribute that message to all phones on the network.

This was the winning design.  Everyone already has a phone.  They’re everywhere. No one has to learn anything new.  We’ve been leaving messages on machines since 1971.

All you need is a subscription, and we’re working on making that famously dead simple.

Current Status

We currently have the prototype system up and running.  We’ve got several networks out there testing the system with us.  There’s a lot of interest in a lot of places that see the potential in the Band of Neighbors Alert System.  We’ve launched a new website.  We’ve won an award.

Now we’re working on making the customer experience top-notch.  We have goals:

1. Easy-peasy sign-up process.
2. All calls are delivered in less than 2 minutes.
3. Powerful online mangement sytem for subscribers.

Watch this space for news.  Exciting changes are underway.

Tags: history